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BASEBALL; Two Sides Firmly Apart With Deadline in Sight

As the number of days to the players' strike deadline dwindled to a single digit, negotiators for players and owners continued to disagree over the effect the owners' economic proposals would have on player salaries.

Donald Fehr, the players' labor leader, said that the clubs were waging ''a wholesale attack on the salary structure'' and that they wanted to ''undermine the operation of the player compensation market.''

Rob Manfred, the clubs' chief labor lawyer, said that the clubs had entered these negotiations with ''a modest set of proposals'' and that they wanted only to create ''a speed bump'' for the biggest-spending teams.

The starkly different views, Fehr's expressed in a memo to players, Manfred's to reporters, echoed circumstances at the bargaining table. The two sides met twice yesterday and discussed the two key economic issues, a luxury tax on payrolls and revenue sharing, but they remained entrenched in their positions.

The two sides are far apart on the two key elements of the luxury tax issue -- the payroll threshold over which a tax would be imposed and the tax rate. The two sides have agreed that the rate would rise each season a team eclipsed the threshold, but that is all they have agreed on.

In a separate memo that Fehr sent to player agents, he compared the amount of money the economic proposals of each side would cost clubs. Using this season's payrolls and last season's local revenue, Fehr said the clubs' proposals would cost the Yankees $86.9 million compared with $28.2 million last year, and would cost the Mets $35.8 million compared with $16.3 million last year.

''It is not difficult,'' Fehr wrote in the memo obtained by The New York Times, ''to see how the owners' combined revenue sharing and luxury tax proposals would be tantamount to a salary cap.''

Manfred disagreed strongly with Fehr's characterizations of the clubs' proposals. The clubs, he said, were seeking an increase in the amount of local revenue they would share and a tax that ''at most would impact a handful of teams.''

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''I can't imagine how one would call that a wholesale assault on the salary structure,'' he said, adding that whatever were to happen to payrolls of the highest-spending clubs would be ''more than made up'' by increased expenditures of other clubs. ''The single biggest change will be a reduction in payroll disparity,'' he said.

Commenting on Fehr's reference to a salary cap, Manfred said: ''If the owners really wanted a salary cap, they know how to propose a salary cap and they would have instructed me to do so. Instead we approached this negotiation with a modest set of proposals. Alone or in combination, they cannot be classified as a salary cap.''

The clubs tried to get a salary cap in the 1994 negotiations, and the players wound up striking on Aug. 12. They did not return until the next April, after a federal judge ruled that the new rules the clubs had tried to implement unilaterally had to be discarded in favor of returning to the rules of the expired agreement.

Asked if he thought the memo to the players was damaging to the talks, Manfred said: ''I assume the memo was sent to brief the players and prepare them for a work stoppage. If he said, 'I agree with Rob Manfred that they are moderate proposals,' I don't think they'd be preparing a work stoppage.''

In his memo to players, Fehr pointed out that the owners' tax proposal would affect seven teams, whose payrolls exceed $102 million.

Five other teams, Fehr wrote, are within $10 million of the clubs' proposed threshold and could exceed it during the years when the threshold would remain $102 million.

''We have had a difficult six or seven days, including setting of the strike date,'' Manfred said, ''but our goal remains to get an agreement before any days are lost to the union's strike.''

Mike Stanton, the Yankees' player representative, concurred with that goal.

''I think there's reason to be a little optimistic just because they keep going back and forth to the table,'' he said after a conference call of the union's executive board. ''If there weren't things going on, then they wouldn't be going back to the table. They're not going to go talk about the weather, not at this point.''